A Way Out of No Way by Raphael G. Warnock

Author:Raphael G. Warnock [Warnock, Raphael G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-06-14T00:00:00+00:00

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So on April 1, Shanan Jones, a young activist pastor I’d recently hired at Ebenezer, and I joined the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, other ministers, activists, lawmakers, and entertainers, including John Legend, in New Orleans for the demonstration. An estimated two thousand people attended the rally at the convention center. During the rally, speakers demanded satellite polling places in cities, including those beyond Louisiana, with large numbers of evacuees. A few months earlier, our government had been boasting about liberating Iraq and bringing democracy there. Our national leaders fully supported the enfranchisement of Iraqi citizens who were living in our country and allowed them to register and cast absentee ballots remotely in seven U.S. cities during that country’s December 2005 parliamentary elections. I couldn’t help thinking, “If democracy is good for Iraq, we ought to try it in Louisiana.”

During the rally, I thought about the New Orleans election being just a couple of weeks away on April 22. It was most likely going to happen. The question was, what were we going to do about it? I was standing onstage, next to Bishop Paul Morton, whose home and whose Greater St. Stephen Full Gospel Baptist Church, one of the largest ministries in the city at the time, had been devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Bishop Morton had recently opened a vibrant new location in Atlanta. I leaned over and posed the question to him, and we agreed to meet in Atlanta to strategize.

A few days later, we came up with a plan to transport New Orleans residents from Atlanta on buses at no cost to participate in the election. The only requirement was that they had to sign up beforehand so that we could plan adequately, which included providing enough coach buses for the trip, as well as transportation to get voters to their individual polling places throughout the city. We got the word out to our congregations and went on television and radio, urging New Orleanians to return home to participate in the election. Bishop Morton and his staff would host us on the New Orleans end, providing a place to land, a hot meal for those returning home, and a staging area. Meanwhile, my staff, including the church administrator, Glenda Boone, Reverend Jones, and a host of volunteers, set up a “war room” in the former Christian Education Building connected to the old church to field calls from New Orleanians wanting to sign up for the trip home to vote.

Our war room was as much symbolic as it was practical. There is beautiful, historic video footage of Dr. King on January 15, 1968, celebrating what turned out to be his final birthday in that room. He had been working hard, preparing to kick off his national Poor People’s Campaign. Confronted by the backlash against the movement that began in the last couple years of his life, and excoriated even by allies within the movement for his stand against the Vietnam War, King was, by all accounts, quite despondent in those days.

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